Christmas

Christmas is a weird time. We've got the whole religious "Our Savior is Born" message from one side and the capitalist "Spend! Spend! Spend!" message from the other. As a frugal atheist, I often find myself wishing the whole thing would go away. There are elements of it I like: some of the music, pumpkin pie, getting a day off from work. I really like wrapping presents - I guess it appeals to my inner artist. Sometimes I even like opening them.

What I don't like is the pressure I feel when it comes to giving. The religious and capitalist messages combine to say "You should give more than you receive" and there are a lot of people in my life who go overboard when it comes to giving presents. Since I don't, I end up getting more presents with bigger price tags than I give. Which leads to guilt. Which I resent. I'd rather drop the whole give presents on this one day routine, and just give what I want when I want. That way there'd be no temptation to keep score on presents.

Bad Day

You know it's a bad day when the car crash right outside my window isn't
able to distract me from the crap I'm trying to deal with.

Test

This is a test of using e-mail to blog. This is only a test. If this had
been an actual blog, you would be given further details on whatever the
hell's on my mind.

Haven't Quit Yet...

...but I did tell the Big Boss that things need to change or I'm walking. He said things will change. That was three months ago. There's been a little change here and there - Barry's handling all the interfacing with one of our clients, even for my projects, and Joe's going to take over the routine heat exchanger work. I'm not sure either of them is too happy about that, but the reality is that as long as I'm producing $30k a month, plus doing tech support, plus a lot of internal support work, I've got a lot of weight to throw around.

New computers for everybody: the Opterons were a little disappointing, with 4GB of RAM but only a little over 3GB were actually available. So the Uber Boss pulled out his checkbook and got a dual Xeon64 with 8GB for everybody in the group. That's a lot of power. Yea for him.

Read recently: Camouflage by Joe Haldeman. Not too deep, but a good page turner.
Now reading: Race to the Pole, about Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole (if you're not familiar with it, they came in second and then everyone died. Bummer.

Yea for me: I've been learning MySQL and PHP. I'll be redoing the entire coastergeek site as a database.